One of the most entertaining conferences I ever attended was Usenix, several years ago. The paper sessions typically went like this: a grad student would stand up and present his and his advisor's research. In the sbsequent question-and-answer period, one of a small number of grey-beards (you'd recognize their names, but I can't remember who exactly it was; I'm old, too) would come to the mic and ask some variant of, "when we tried that back in the '80s, it didn't work because of.... How are you dealing with the problems?" There was never any real answer. (To be truthful, there were also a number of responses along the lines of "Why didn't you cite our earlier work?" which were more annoying since the typical true answer would have been "Because you only published it in a single post in rec.arts.no-one-reads-this." Bah.)

Since then, I've learned one thing: experience in this field doesn't give you any advantage. Or, more precisely, Cassandra, it doesn't give you any advantage that anyone will pay attention to.

I've had many similar conversations since that conference, usually along the lines of:

Them: "We should do X."

We: "That didn't work the last time; A, B, and C happen and only super-genius levels of D will get you out of the mess, which we don't have."

Them: "But X is the hot newness and everything's different this time, anyway."

Or sometimes:

We: "We're doing Y."

Them: "That's stupid, everyone is doing Z now." (Them almost never has more than 2-3 years of experience, by the way.)

We: "No one we've hired in the last ten years knows how to do Z, Z offers no actual advantage over Y, and I'd personally prefer not to have to deal with 27 different ways of doing the same thing."

Them: "I'm doing Z."

We: "Great. You'll be solely responsible for that project until you quit, then we'll throw it away and rewrite it. Just like last time."

Sure, you can keep up with the technology fashion; that's fairly easy. But it's a bit dispiriting to see the same problems in the new tech from the last time the dharma wheel rolled around. And to be unable to convince the new kids not to try to cross the railroad bridge because the 12:15 really does have a good on-time record. The entertainment value of watching projects hit the same shoals eventually loses its charm.